When we moved in here 10 years ago, there was an old Soviet style couch already in place. Couch, sofa, divan - whatever you want to call it. I grew up calling them "couches". This old thing was already broken - the left arm was not firmly attached, but had to be pounded back on whenever the couch was moved and sometimes after we'd had people over who actually sat on the couch. The front wooden beam or bar that held the two arms together in front was also broken when we moved in. The first time anyone sat on it (I think it was either the landlady or the real estate agent who facilitated our rent agreement), there was a big cracking noise. Because I knew that beam was cracked, I rarely ever sat on that couch. The couch was in our livingroom for 10 years and I sat on it maybe 4 or 5 times a year. Guests would sit on it. We could pull it out and make it into a very uncomfortable bed. We'd move it over behind the table for more seating when we had more than 6 guests over (was that a chore! that thing was heavy!). But mostly the couch sat there at the end of the livingroom, covered in a green shroud because it was a very ugly bright mustard-ish color, with a stuffed turtle sitting on one end and 4 little bird pillows sitting on the other end.
When we paid the rent last week, I asked our landlord and landlady if they could take it away. Told them we didn't want it any more. Actually this is how the conversation went:
"My exercise bike is in the small bedroom because it takes up too much room in the livingroom. I would like to put it, in the winter, where the couch is now. We don't want the couch any more."
(Landlady) "That's ok."
"It's broken. Should we just take it out to the trash?"
(Landlady) "Can't you just put it in the other room?"
Me - silently - WHAT?? I just said we didn't want it any more. What part of 'take it away' do you not understand?
(Landlord, in an aside to his wife) "Honey, they don't have any room for it. They want us to take it away."
(Landlady) "Oh."
(Landlord) "Just take it out to the trash."
(One of them - I don't remember which) "Let's ask Galena downstairs below you if she wants it." So, the landlord runs out the door and a few minutes later he's back saying, yes, Galena wants it. She will have someone take it over to her flat in a different district which she rents out.
Now the interesting thing is, she is going to rent this flat to our "Ukrainian daughter", Ira and her husband, Yura, and their new baby, Sasha. Rent it for the cost of them doing a certain amount of repair to the flat each month. My first thought about getting rid of that couch was that maybe we could buy it really, really, really cheap - and give it to Yuri and Ira and maybe Yuri could fix it up. Then I decided that no, it should just go in the trash - someone would haul it away and fix it up. Either way, it seems that Ira and Yuri were destined to have that couch. :-)
The couch is gone. Mel and Ivan and Sergei K. hauled the thing downstairs. Maybe it's still in Galena's flat - or maybe she had someone haul it to her other flat. I don't know. All I do know is suddenly our livingroom looks a LOT bigger! The exercise bike is still in this office room with me, taking up any free space here (it just barely fits in here and I have to move it if I want to get to the other end of this little room for anything). We'll move it out into the livingroom when the weather gets icy and dangerous for me to go walking.
The other thing that we told our landlord was that the kalunka needed to be replaced. It has been getting more and more dangerous to use. Recently flames started showing up at the top in the little air vent. They are NOT supposed to be any where near that vent! One of us had to either stand and hold the dial at a certain temperature (it was spring loaded for some reason and was either totally on or totally off unless held inbetween), or fiddle with it over and over until the flames no longer grew to what is that - 18 inches or so? There was a very real concern that the whole thing was going to blow up. I've written about the kalunka many times, so you know what it is like!
Well, Ivan (the landlord) didn't even want Mel to turn it on. He understood immediately the gravity of the situation and said he'd bring over a new one. In fact, he'd take that one now if we could live without water for 3 days. ?? No! Actually he meant live without HOT water for 3 days, which we could have done if it had been any other 3 days. Actually, we could have lived without the hot water even during those 3 days ... but Mel was preaching on Sunday (the 2nd of the 3 days) and really wanted a shower before he went to church. Remember - it is hot and humid (to us) here and after a day of walking around the city, his hair is standing up like old Red Skelton's hair used to do (boy, does that date me!). We said, please wait to take the kalunka, we want to use it once during those 3 days. He indicated that he would be back on Monday to get the old kalunka and replace it.
That was on Thursday last week. Friday he showed up with a new kalunka. He sat it down on the livingroom floor, in it's new box, and left. We got to walk around it all weekend. No problem. It was NEW. It was going to be smaller than the old one. It was going to work correctly. And we were HAPPY about it.
Monday we waited. We waited and waited. We waited some more. Finally, around 1:00 I said, you know, this is Ukraine Independence Day, maybe he's not coming. So Mel called Ivan. No, he was not coming today, he'd come tomorrow. Mel told him we wanted to go for a walk, that's why we were calling - he said, go for your walk. So we did.
We walked down to the city center and had a late lunch at Iceberg. I even had French Fries. I haven't ordered French fries here in a very long time. In fact, I don't remember the last time I ate French fries in Ukraine, other than at McDonald's up in Kiev. They tasted good. Decadent. I don't eat potatoes very often any more, and seldom do I eat French fries - ever, anywhere. We sat and ate and then we sat and talked and then we decided to stop sitting and go to Nova Linea and buy a bench for the livingroom. So, we did.
We walked up to the bus stop, got on a #9 and rode out to the corner where the trolley turns but we need to go straight. We got off at the stop and walked up to the store. We shopped. I bought some stuff to help me strip the wallpaper and paint the livingroom. No paint yet, just some tools. We looked at benches again and decided exactly what we (I) wanted to buy for our livingroom. We looked at the price, we pulled out our wallets and counted our money. :-( Not enough. A very nice young salesman came over and I told him we wanted to buy 'this bench' but we didn't have enough money. Did they have more in stock?
Now you have to realize that I don't know all those words. I don't know how to say, "Do you have more in stock?" No, I said something like, "We can't buy this today, do you have more than this one?" And he smiled and said, "Of course! We have several." And he took us over and showed us where they were stacked in their boxes, ready to be sold and put together in your own home by yourself. I asked about the specific color. Some were of an orangish tinted wood, which I do not care for. What I wanted was the "coffee" tinted one. And they did have more of them. Yea! We said we'd be back on Wednesday (after all, the landlord was coming over on Tuesday to replace the kalunka - right?).
We walked home. Oh my. I knew it was not very far, really, from our flat. Actually it was just about the same distance as walking to the city center from our flat, just a bit more hilly. Not big hills, by any means, but when it is hot and I am sweaty and already tired, and the sun is beating down fiercely on top of my head - well, by the time we got half way home I was walking at a snail's pace. It's good that I had a bottle of water with me!
We haven't walked that route in years. Our walking is always in the exact opposite direction. In fact, the last time we walked that way that I remember, was in the winter about 8 years ago. Wow! It's a very nice area, I don't know why we don't walk that way more often. We finally got home and my legs felt like chopped liver. :) Mel is in better shape than me, so altho he was very hot and tired, too, his legs were fine. I figured it out on google maps, using a special tool to determine distance, and we walked over 4 miles total that day.
Tuesday dawned bright and clear. We waited for the landlord. We waited and waited. Finally he came over, picked up the kalunka he'd dropped off, told us it was the wrong one, and left. Bummer. Mel had meetings all afternoon. After the last one, we asked Sergei to call and find out when Ivan was planning to come over again. Now, Mel would have called, but Ivan talks 500 miles a minute and he speaks mostly Surzhik - the mix of Russian and Ukrainian that is common here (and we wonder why it is so hard to learn the language....it always takes me a few minutes to figure out the person is not speaking pure Russian). Sergei told us even he has a hard time understand Ivan some times.
Wednesday morning at 9:00 Ivan and Louisa showed up. I had taken a sleeping pill the night before because I'm doing one of my 'can't get to sleep until 3:00 or later in the morning spells' again. Mel came in and woke me up at 8:30. I was still drowsy when they arrived. I felt like I was in a nightmare - walking through thick mud, trying to understand, trying to be a good hostess to Louisa but failing miserably because I couldn't get two thoughts in a row to come out of my head. Sigh. By the time Ivan and Mel had torn the old one off the wall - it was NOT a simple procedure at all to get the pipes apart - they'd been painted shut for 25 or more years - I was mostly in my awake mind.
Louisa thinks that if she talks really, really loud, then I will understand her better. Oh my. But we sat and chatted about all sorts of things. I got out the dictionary and that helped a lot. Finally I got a great idea - I asked her if she'd like to see some photos on the computer! Yep - we spent the next couple of hours looking at photos and talking about a wide variety of things.
The long and the short of it is - they got the old kalunka off and the new one on - but they couldn't get it to light correctly. The "new" one is an old one that looks just like the old old one, only the insides are new. :) I was disappointed - I wanted a new new one, but you take what you get, right? Ivan wanted to come back the next day and replace the exhaust pipe. Actually, he wanted to come back and paint the old one and put it back up. He asked when would be a good time to come back. We said after 9:00 in the morning. And they left.
And we left. We walked over to Nova Linea, looked at new light fixtures for the kitchen and then went over and bought the bench. We got a taxi home. When we got out of the taxi, our upstairs neighbor was waiting for us outside. And she was HOT. Nina. "What were you doing? WHY were you messing with the gas pipes all morning?" Mad, mad, mad - angry, angry, angry. I tried to calm her down but she was spitting mad. Mad we hadn't told her we were going to do that repair work. Mad, I tell you! Told us she'd been terrified all day long because she knew it was us, no one else was home. I told her it was our landlord, not us. She was still mad. My Russian tutor showed up about that time for my Russian lesson and she gave Lyudmilla an earful. Told Lyudmilla to tell me that next time we do any repair work to warn her first. Spitting mad. I understood her perfectly - Nina has very good Russian, mostly unpolluted by Surzhik. Why she didn't just come down and find out what was going on is beyond me. When I told Ivan about it later, he said she was just being nosey. Actually, she was terrified WE, Mel and me, (the stupid foreigners) were going to blow up the whole building. Her attitude and words were very clear. Sigh. I assured her that I would tell her next time.
We had no hot water, of course - the exhaust pipe was lying out on the balcony. Yesterday morning Ivan showed up again, went out on the balcony and painted the pipe. Then Louisa showed up.
Now the night before Mel had put the bench together. I really like it. We put it on two rugs that we'd bought specifically for it to sit on. Non-slip rugs so the parquet wouldn't get damaged accidentally. I'll have to move the photos and cross-stitches a bit, but I'm planning on stripping the wallpaper anyway, and painting the room, so I'll do that then.
Louisa liked the bench. She was in rapture over the bench. We talked about the bench for over an hour. How much did it cost? She told us about benches like it in Switzerland, where her son lives. Was it plastic? Metal!! Wow. And so forth and so on. She sat on it. I pulled a chair over and sat near her and we talked. And talked some more. And Ivan finished what he was doing in the kitchen. 
But unfortunately, this kalunka is not working right. He'll have to come back on Saturday - or is it Monday? I forget. Then he'll work on it some more. But we can use it now, we just have to be careful how we turn it off. We're used to that - we've been doing that for over 10 years, being careful how we turn off the kalunka. I'm hoping he can fix it so we can just turn it on and off and not be so very careful how we do it. You know - use it normally, not with kid gloves. :) We'll see. I have a feeling we are just going to do the same ol', same ol'. But that's ok - it is working 'correctly' and I'm not afraid it's just going to blow up on me!I am exhausted from people. I was planning on having a day all by myself today. Mel is gone to meetings all afternoon. No one is coming over. It's already after noon and I'm not even dressed yet. But it was not to be. I got a phone call last night from Alys, asking me to come over and spend the afternoon with her. I had to make a decision, a quick decision. She is having some culture shock issues right now, she is single, she was recently quite ill with whatever this bug is that's been going around. I decided - right now Alys is more important than me having an "alone" day. I can make it one more day. Saturday - Saturday will be my alone day. If I find out that Ivan is coming tomorrow to fix the kalunka - I think I may just disappear over to a park on the other side of the city.
I'm an introvert and I'm almost totally peopled out. But I'm not ready to scream yet - not quite. And Alys is also an introvert and it will be QUIET at her flat. I can do that! :) (Noise - no matter what it is - kids screaming and yelling and laughing, dogs barking, loud music, loud cars - when I'm maxed out, they all send me to tears. I MUST have quiet some times.)
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